“A foolish son is the ruin of his father, and the contentions of a wife are a continual dripping” (Prov 19:13).
“It happened! I don’t know how—it just happened!” Do you ever hear explanations like that? That’s how our next episode begins. “Afterward it happened that he loved a woman in the Valley of Sorek, whose name was Delilah” (Jdg 16:4). The name Delilah seems to come from the word dalah, meaning “to dangle, figuratively, to deliver.” Watch out, Samson! He was heels over head for the woman (yes, head over heels is our normal position). Immediately the lords of the Philistines came up to her and said, “Entice him, and find out where his great strength lies, and by what means we may overpower him, that we may bind him to afflict him; and every one of us will give you eleven hundred pieces of silver” (v 5). It seems Delilah had no love at all for Samson. But now those pieces of silver—that was a different matter! She’d just love to have those. So she began dangling her charms before him. Thinking he was safe, he began a deadly cat and mouse game with his fate. “If they bind me with seven fresh bowstrings…new ropes that have never been used…weave the seven locks of my head into the web of the loom…” (vv 7, 11, 13). It was all for nothing. But Delilah didn’t quit: “when she pestered him daily with her words and pressed him, so that his soul was vexed to death,…he told her all his heart” (vv 16-17). Asleep to his danger, the barber did the deed, and the Philistines lunged. Samson said, “‘I will go out as before, at other times, and shake myself free!’ But he did not know that the Lord had departed from him” (v 20). Say, Christian, do you know the secret of his strength? Was it his long hair? Of course not. It’s the same place where your strength lies to overcome every temptation, every foe. His strength was in obedience to God’s word.